Aubrey

Daventry, the sculptor, is buried in a little graveyard near one of our posts. Just now our section of the line is quiet, so I often go and sit there. Stretching myself on a flat stone, I dream for hours.

Silence and solitude! How good the peace of it all seems! Around me the grasses weave a pattern, and half hide the hundreds of little wooden crosses. Here is one with a single name:

AUBREY.

Who was Aubrey I wonder? Then another:

To Our Beloved Comrade.

Then one which has attached to it, in the cheapest of little frames, the crude water-color daub of a child, three purple flowers standing in a yellow vase. Below it, painfully printed, I read:

To My Darling Papa -- Thy Little Odette .

And beyond the crosses many fresh graves have been dug. With hungry open mouths they wait. Even now I can hear the gunsthat are going to feed them. Soon there will be more crosses, and more and more. Then they will cease, and wives and mothers will come here to weep.